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In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars
Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times
VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.
As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.
(11 May 2009)
Why does the NY Times print this subversive stuff? A better life without cars?
Related from Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard: Workers cut costs by working from home. -BA
Cities Can Save the Earth
Richard Register, Foreign Policy In Focus
The climate crisis won’t be solved by changing light bulbs and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less. It’s going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them.
The key to changing our cities involves the car. Cars dominate cities in the rich countries, and they are increasingly swamping poor countries as well. Big auto companies, are rapidly building car factories and highways in China and India. Many cities, like Berkeley, California where I lived for 30 years, don’t have a single pedestrian street — and their citizens don’t even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Only one out of 10 people on the planet actually drives cars, but drivers are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage through the automobile-sprawl pattern of development.
The concepts behind the ecocity are fairly simple. They involve a shift in development toward centers of high diversity:
* Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit;
* Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture;
* Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling.
A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.
Despite these obstacles, there are tools available to help us move in the right direction immediately. In many places — such as San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon in the United States, and to a greater extent in Curitiba, Brazil — a certain amount of this “ecocity” thinking is already going on. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of recapturing the past. Cities used to be built for pedestrians. The core of some of these cities remains in Europe and China, though China is bulldozing some of these ancient city centers as we speak. Some cities like Venice, Italy, the Medina of Fez, and hilly Gulongyu, China are 100% car-free — and very successful.
It’s possible to build ecocities, and we must do so if we are ever to solve the looming triple crisis of climate change, declining biodiversity, and dwindling fossil fuel energy.
(12 May 2009)
Richard Register is an EB contributor.
Why Can’t We Build an Affordable House?
Witold Rybczynski, Wilson Quarterly
The housing market is in tatters, and house prices continue to fall precipitously in many parts of the country, so it might seem a strange time to bring up the subject of housing affordability. But one of the reasons we are in this mess is that people bought houses they couldn’t really afford. At some point in the future, consumer confidence will be restored and people will start buying houses again. Pent-up demand, and the inevitable delays in restarting an industry that has seen the withdrawal of many home builders, will likely produce a spike in prices, and once again the affordability issue will come to the fore.
Witold Rybczynski is Martin and Margie Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town, appeared in paperback this spring.
(Summer 2008)
At Mother Jones Kevin Drum comments:
Why do houses cost so much today? In the Wilson Quarterly, Witold Rybczynski writes that even when you adjust for inflation and home size, prices are still considerably higher today than they were 50 years ago. There are two reasons, he says:
The first is Proposition 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that required local governments to reduce property taxes and limit future increases, and sparked similar taxpayer-driven initiatives in other states. Henceforth, municipalities were unable to finance the up-front costs of infrastructure in new communities, as they had previously done, and instead required developers to pay for roads and sewers, and often for parks and other public amenities as well. These costs were passed on to home buyers, drastically increasing the selling price of a house.
Interesting! If Rybczynski is right, we now have lower taxes but higher house prices. And perhaps that’s fair. But it’s also a godsend for everyone who bought a house more than 20 years ago. In California, it means that your original home price was low because taxes paid for the property improvements. Then the high taxes that built your neighborhood were capped, which drove up the price of building new neighborhoods, and since housing is fungible it also drove up the price of existing homes like yours. In other words: low price, low taxes, lots of appreciation. That’s great news for all us baby boomers, but I’m afraid the Xers are paying the price. Par for the course, isn’t it? Someday you guys are going to figure out just how badly we’ve screwed you over and it’s going to be Soylent Green time.
(Rybczynski’s second reason is development restrictions that artifically lower the supply of housing. Read the whole piece for more details.)
American Radicals as Co-op Housing Pioneers
Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times
Guided by memory after nearly four years away, Michal Goldman last week walked through the courtyard of a block-square apartment house in the Bronx. Past the planters, past the fountain, she came to the doorway that was her destination. She pointed to its lintel, adorned with a bas-relief of a hammer and sickle, the stonework split by cracks.
“It seems appropriate,” she said in a tone that was both astringent and sentimental.
The portal that held Ms. Goldman’s attention was one particularly revealing part of the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a housing complex created and populated 80 years ago by American Communists and their sympathizers. Commonly known as “the Coops,” the project has been privately owned for decades and includes only a handful of its original 2,000 residents.
After almost a decade of gestation Ms. Goldman’s documentary about the Coops, “At Home in Utopia,” will be broadcast at 10 p.m. Tuesday as part of PBS’s “Independent Lens” series. In this film she has recaptured a daring social experiment, limning its idealism on race relations and social justice and its ultimately fatal embrace of Communist doctrine.
… Now the tenants tend to be Cambodian and West Indian. The library is now a laundry room, the cafeteria is a management office. But the gardens, part of the pride of the radical founders, are still being tended.
“They’re planting here,” Ms. Goldman said, marveling. “They can’t resist sticking their trowels in the dirt and making things grow.”
(26 April 2009)
